Comfort
by shelllessturtle
Summary: To comfort is to soothe, console, or reassure. When someone Emily once knew dies and her walls come crashing down, Aaron is desperate for a way to help. Hotch/Emily, spoilers for 4x17, "Demonology." Rated T for "To Be Safe." Sequel to "Realize" and "Claim".


A/N: Okay, so here it is. Yes, it's late. Yes, y'all should have expected it. No, I don't keep to schedules. No, I don't follow deadlines. Plus there was Les Miserables and going to Comic Con (I MET WIL WHEATON YOU GUYS) and coming out to my parents and getting ready to start school and having a fight with the online loan application and...yeah. Stuff like that.

Will it help if I say I'm sorry?

Anyway, this story. This is not my usual cup of tea. I don't normally write stuff like this. I write the cute stuff, the fluffy stuff, the fun romp you go to read when you've had a bad day and you want something from your favorite ship that will make you smile. This...this is not that. This is not fun, or cute, or fluffy. This is hurting and open and raw. A good alternate title for this would be "On the Pain of Emily Prentiss" (or "A Study in Semi-Colons;" I use them a lot).

This came pouring out of me when I got back to my parents' after Comic Con. My head full of Wil Wheaton and John Barrowman and the Batwoman commission I'd gotten, I sat down on the couch and brain-vomited angst onto the page. I only hope, ducklings, that it doesn't hurt too much, and that the end makes up for the pain.

Disclaimer: I own nothing. Not even the dividing line.

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The moment she walked into his office, he knew something was wrong. She seemed dazed, moving slowly, her eyes hardly focused.

"Emily?" he said quietly. "Are you okay?"

"I—I don't know," she replied. Carefully, as if picking each word was a strain, she explained what had happened at the bar, what she had learned from her friend, what she needed.

"Take all the leeway you need," he told her, and then—self-imposed rules be damned—he got up and pulled her into a tight hug. "I'm here," he whispered, and felt her relax into him.

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Sometimes it surprised him how often she needed to be reminded that she wasn't alone anymore. Then he remembered how long she _had_ been alone; growing up as she had the daughter of an active ambassador, she'd never had many friends, and it had always been hard for her to keep them after moving away. Her parents had never been much of a family to her, either; more focused on keeping up the appearance of a happy family than making an _actually_ happy family, they had been content to let the wounds in their personal relationships fester, so long as they _looked_ like they were okay.

Emily's work in the Midwest had been lonely and full of movement, too, as she had been bounced from city to city, no one knowing what to do with the lost, empty woman they had all thought her to be. He remembered talking to her former supervisors shortly after her first case; cold, they had called her, and distant. She didn't try to make better relationships with her colleagues, and kept her personal life firmly out of reach, they had said. He hadn't been able to reconcile their words with the eager-to-please but determined woman who had jumped feet-first into her first case, who encouraged Morgan in his schemes to get the team out to bars, who had been the first to notice Reid's problem.

He had asked her about it recently; her response had been to smile sadly and say, "Once you get a reputation as a cold bitch, it's hard to shake." He hadn't pressed further; he had seen the ghosts of her past haunting behind her eyes, and he knew that there were some places she wasn't ready to go yet.

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When the complaint came in, he knew that he would have to talk to her. There was something to this that she wasn't telling him. So he asked her to come into his office after her friend left, hoping that she would let him in, let him help, but her walls were up and she got very defensive very fast.

"Emily, please," he said desperately, "don't make me order you home."

"Something is wrong, Aaron!" she almost shouted at him. "There is something very, very wrong with this entire situation, and I need to find out what!"

There. That was something he could go on. He softened his voice considerably, "Get your coat."

"What? Why?" she demanded.

"We're going to get coffee."

He told Dave that they were leaving, and took Emily's hand as soon as they entered the elevator, determined not to let it go until she told him what was going on.

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They sat down at a small booth in a local coffee shop, steaming beverages in hand, their fingers still twined together.

"Why the sudden change in tactic?" Emily asked, her voice and expression guarded.

"First person singular," he replied. At her confused look, he continued. "When you talk about a case, you always refer to the whole team: 'we should do that,' or 'we think this,' but today, you said, '_I_ need to find out.' This is personal for you, and beyond just his being your old friend. You said so yourself; you hadn't seen him in years. What is it? Why is he so important?"

When it looked like she wasn't going to answer, he added, "Please, Emily. Let me help."

She was silent for a moment longer, then words came pouring out, tripping over each other in their desperation to be heard. Emily, who had a politician's talent for seeming to say everything while in reality saying nothing, who knew so many words that she used them as a mask, who compartmentalized better than anyone else on the team, couldn't keep the raw pain out of her voice as she told him the story of her friend Matt and being fifteen. He heard her voice break when she said she'd do anything to fit in. He saw tears swimming in her eyes when she said she'd gotten pregnant. He tasted bile in his throat when she told him what her priest had said. He felt a stab in his gut when she told him what Matthew had done for her. When she got to Matthew's actions afterwards, he moved next to her and held her close. At the end of the story, she broke down and cried, and he almost joined her.

He wanted to weep for the childhood she never had, for the innocence she had lost so early, for the choices she had had to make with no support but a boy just as inexperienced as she. He wanted to rage at the cruelty of the grown man who had cast out a young girl when she needed help, at the thoughtlessness of the ambassador who had ignored her own daughter when she needed a mom the most, at the stupidity of the parents who had blamed Emily for being unable to take care of their child. But he couldn't, so he held Emily and let her cry, until he felt her walls go up again and she pulled away.

"Hey," he said gently, "you can—"

"I can't," she responded tersely. "Not yet. Not until this is over."

He took both her hands in his. "Then when it is, remember, I am here. I will always be here, for whatever you need."

She smiled wanly, but he believed she meant it. "Thank you."

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He shouldn't have taken the priest to the airport. He should have had Dave go with Morgan, and not trusted him to look after Emily. It wasn't that he _didn't_ trust Dave, just that the older man didn't know what was in this for her. Maybe, if he had gone, he wouldn't be desperately searching a snowy DC for his errant partner; he might be wandering the city with her, but at least then she wouldn't be alone.

When he did find her, she was standing in front of a church, staring blankly at her bloody fingers. Immediately, he was out of the car and at her side, tissues in hand, gently pinching the bridge of her nose to stop the blood flow. Once the bleeding had stopped, he cleaned her up as well as he could with the tissues and some snow.

After that, getting her home was easy. He had been there so many times now that Emily had joked about getting him his own pass for the parking garage; he already kept several changes of clothes in her closet. Neither of them spoke until they were sitting on the couch in Emily's living room, with her wrapped in a blanket and mugs of tea on the coffee table in front of both of them.

"Why didn't you come back to Quantico?" he asked. He tried his level best to sound non-accusatory, and either it worked, or Emily didn't notice his tone.

She shrugged. "I needed a few minutes alone, and before I knew it, I'd been walking for over half an hour. I was about to call you when I noticed my nose was bleeding."

He nodded, accepting her answer at face value, then took her hands in his. "Anything else you want to tell me about this?" he asked gently, hoping she would open up and let him in.

"Just—just that John was the father." With that, she collapsed into him, her defenses shattered, and tears falling for the second time that day.

He gathered her into him, cradling her against his chest, and letting her release years of stored, hidden sorrow. He didn't know how to comfort her, how to help her cope with grief three decades buried, so he did the only thing he knew how to do; he loved her. In the way he stroked her back, the way he held her close, the way he rocked her gently, he tried to show her how much she meant to him. While he knew that he could never know exactly what she felt, nor could he ever explain how much his heart ached for her, he was determined to try for the rest of his life.

So, as she let fall the tears of her grief onto the jagged edges of her long-shattered heart, finally dulling them so each thought was no longer a searing pain, he whispered the words neither of them had before been brave enough to voice: "I love you, Emily."

**~To Be Continued in "Push"~**

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A/N2: So there it is. The next step on their journey together. Let's just hope that their relationship continues in this general direction, hm?


End file.
